The Outlaw Rattlesnake Jake
by general zero
Summary: Rattlesnake Jake doesn't take orders from anybody—which makes life complicated, since the Devil owns his soul. It will take all of Jake's cunning and nerve to get it back, especially since he keeps getting sidetracked by pathetically helpless and frustratingly friendly critters who won't leave him alone. Before Jake knows it, he's got himself a few friends-er, accomplices.


**Hiya! So this will be continued, but for now it can be read as a one-shot. Rated teen because Jake is violent. Starts off directly after the movie ends. Please enjoy and leave reviews!**

 **Inspired by the movie: The Outlaw Josey Wales, in which a hardened outlaw keeps finding himself stuck rescuing people, all the while his old enemies are after him.**

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Jake left the burgeoning lake that used to be the town of Dirt far behind. The sun and sand quickly leached all remaining moisture from his coiled body, and as the thundering of geysers grew gradually less the frantic shrieks of Dirt's ex-mayor grew increasingly more shrill and desperate. He was no longer struggling within Jake's encircling scales, simply sobbing and groveling for his wretched life. Disgusting.

All features of the landscape disappeared save the perfectly flat earth, cracked and hardened like a burnt cake, and the sky, bleached almost to colorlessness by the relentless sun. Heat shimmers hung like curtains all around, but Jake welcomed the heat. He belonged out here in the raging sun. After all, the desert and death were the closest of friends; the barely contained fury coursing through his muscles was nearly as hot as the desert around him.

Guided more by instinct than by any conscious navigation, the Grim Reaper homed in on a particularly massive crack in the earth—in fact, it could better be described as a chasm. It was long and crooked, resembling a leering mouth. Even the omnipresent sun managed to penetrate its blackness for only a few feet, and the stark dark hole seemed surreal in the desert brightness.

Jake's captive spotted the chasm and his gaze locked onto the hungry hole like a creature caught in a car's headlights. His pupils narrowed nearly out of existence even as his eyes widened. The pit must be the entrance to Hell itself, and Jake was headed straight for it. The mayor's shrieks intensified as his scheming soul quaked and recoiled from the violent justice it could sense approaching. Jake dived right into the chasm, long body stretching out to nearly its full length. The knot where it was wrapped tightly around the tortoise barely fit through, but Jake was unconcerned when his captive bumped sharply against the lip of the pit.

It was not a portal to hell, as far as Jake knew. The chasm did go quite deep, but the gunslinger never went farther than his personal hideout, which was only a few feet under the surface, where an irregularity in the chasm wall created a shallow cave. It was an excellent lair, very difficult for any other creature to get in or out of. Jake intended to make full use of that fact in the days to come. John Tortoise would pay long and slowly for daring to pull a fast one on Rattlesnake Jake. However, Jake's current anger proved too strong to allow for objectivity or long range plans. He just wanted to smash.

The resulting crack of the tortoise's shell against the far wall of the cave—and the accompanying peal of pain and terror—was delicious. Twice more he slung the creature against the hard rock before Jake became aware of another presence in the cave. It was the familiar prickling around his Gatling that alerted him, and he couldn't stop the quick glance he threw at the chasm entrance. He knew it wasn't big enough for a normal hawk to get even a claw in to threaten him, but the one that menaced him was by no means an ordinary hawk.

There was no one there, but the presence chose that moment to announce itself.

"Stop it, Jacob. I still have use for him."

Jake slipped a section of coil around the tortoise and curled him close. The cripple had ceased shrieking momentarily, and at the sound of the voiced seemed to glimpse his salvation. "Help me! Please! I'll do anything. He's a monster."

Jake rolled his eyes at the pleading. He had heard it all before. To the voice he sneered: "What use could a blubbering, two-timing cripple be?" He snapped his coils outward, propelling the tortoise once more against the crevice wall. The old critter's shell was holding up well, and Jake sourly concluded that it was getting support from a certain third party.

"Stop! Don't you dare touch him again." The voice didn't raise in tempo or volume, nor change in any audible way, but it now carried the scream of a hawk somewhere within its mellow tone. Jake froze briefly before regaining his equilibrium. He left the mayor alone, though. The voice continued. "I didn't come here to witness one of your tantrums. I want to know why you two failed so spectacularly to complete my instructions."

"He's completely mad!" groaned the tortoise. "He wouldn't listen to me—"

"He wouldn't let me do my job. Too soft!" Jake spat.

"If you had killed Rango when I told you to—"

"—he woulda died a hero. Breakin' a man is better. Dead men stay down, but broken ones bring everyone else down too."

"Except he didn't stay broken, did he?" retorted the tortoise, regaining a hint of his former animation. "He beat you with a bunch of bats and one bullet."

"He had help," Jake growled. Jake had seen it in his eyes—not a killer, but a legend. The little fraud had changed overnight, sold his soul the same way Jake had, but to a different buyer. When the gunslinger had spent his bullets and whirled to find himself looking down the barrel of a Colt 45, Jake had seen that buyer—or the trace of Him that He left to mark His heroes—in Rango's eyes.

"What help?" asked the voice suspiciously.

Jake smirked, always pleased to be the bearer of bad news. "Your brother's got Himself another legend."

The air in the chasm grew thick. Jake could feel the frustration of the presence slide wetly over him and forced himself not to flinch. The tortoise was not so composed; he began to whimper again, and Jake was itching to plug his sobbing mouth with a pound or two of lead. The idea was so attractive that he began refilling his Gatling from the gun belt wrapped around him. He carefully aligned the gun's shaft with one of the bullets and then spun the barrels. The gun rolled along the belt flawlessly, picking up each bullet with a soft click. By the time he finished the air was once again thin enough to breathe.

The presence was no less angry, however. " _Jacob._ "

It was a command, a summons to attention that Jake could not ignore. "Yes sir?" The words were forced out painfully. Jake's urge to shoot something was growing stronger; it screamed like sand under his scales.

"I told you that this job was of paramount delicacy and importance. I told you that you would need to follow John's orders explicitly. I told you to behave, for once in your life, like a civilized creature."

"If the job was so all-fired important you shoulda picked someone more reliable to play _his_ part." Jake gestured vehemently in the mayor's direction. "The bastard tried to kill me."

The voice held no surprise, only a cool detachment that contrasted starkly with his earlier, irritated tone. "A temporary lapse in judgment, I'm sure. And you've certainly seen to it that he has paid for his mistake. Now, I must somehow redeem this mess, and you two will have to help."

Jake was not going to let the matter drop so easily. There was no way he was working with or for the mayor of Dirt again. "The Grim Reaper doesn't take orders from pathetic filth like him."

"You'll take orders from whoever I tell you to! I made you, and I will unmake you. The Grim Reaper is nothing. _You_ are nothing, a bumbling amateur who thinks that every problem can be solved by blowing a hole in it. You have no subtly, no intelligence, no tact."

"And here I thought you hired me because I was good at blowin' holes in things."

"The time for brute force has past."

Jake's eyes sharpened. _There's no room for gunslingers anymore._ He rotated the barrels on his rattle slowly, each click punctuating his thoughts. There was a pattern to the conversations he'd had with the mayor and his employer lately.

Click. _I've been letting you run loose too long, Jacob._

Jake hadn't wanted to take the job at all, at least not until it was strategically let slip that Rango was claiming to be his brother. The nerve! And yet… it was such a convenient excuse to bring him in.

Click. _All my problems are taken care of. Except for one._

The mayor, criticizing every move he made, never letting him in on the entire plan.

Click. _One last bullet to kill one last outlaw._

When the tortoise tried to kill him Jake had realized he'd been played, but now he knew the true extent of the deception. His anger, up until now boiling at the betrayal of the incompetent mayor, expanded to encompass a new target as he put together the clues he'd been missing ever since the beginning of this blasted job. Jake's voice deadened to the same detached calm he had used to break Rango. The anger was there still, but against such an opponent it was necessary to be careful. Instead, he smiled wryly, spinning his Gatling chambers.

"You told him to kill me."

"Now Jacob, why would I do that?" The calculated surprise in the voice confirmed Jake's accusation. He went on.

"You've got big plans, don't you? Big _delicate_ plans to tame the West and drag everyone down quietly to Hell. You don't want hired guns anymore, you want them sleek politicians. Critters like him." Jake knocked the side of the tortoise's shell and sent him spinning and howling around in circles. "Me, I'm obsolete: a big, dumb gunfighter. And you're stuck with me."

Jake retrieved the still spinning tortoise and slid him right to the edge of the cave overlooking the chasm. He tipped the politician out of his coils—the mayor screamed as he fell to his supposed death. His shell, however, caught the other wall of the pit and balanced there just as Jake had calculated. The outlaw rattled his Gatling, eyes fixed on the cringing tortoise.

"Put him back," demanded the voice. "Don't you harm a single scale on his head."

Jake ignored the presence in favor of treating the ex-mayor to the hellfire gaze. The mayor's groveling sobs silenced instantly. Jake resumed addressing the voice. "Now, I'm a reasonable fellow. If you don't want me around, I'll just leave."

Jake aimed his gun at the mayor. His mouth parted slightly, tongue flicking out to taste the tortoise's delicious terror. "But see, as the Grim Reaper, I never leave a place without taking a soul."

"Jacob, if you pull that trigger you will regret it for the rest of your very short life. I will hunt you to the ends of the Earth. There is no place you can hide from me." The presence spoke quickly, bordering on the frantic, confirming Jake's suspicion that He wouldn't, or couldn't, intervene. "Jacob! I order you not to!"

The outlaw let his rattle give one last metallic ring. "Go to hell," he told the Devil. "I don't work for you anymore."

He didn't cease fire until the Gatling had run dry and the only remainder of the former mayor of Dirt was the echo of his dying scream.


End file.
